


Rage

by giantessmess



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a happy-ish ending, Anxiety Disorder, Cat Grant-centric, F/F, Psychology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 23:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10449618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giantessmess/pseuds/giantessmess
Summary: Cat Grant has a tenuous grasp on her own anger issues. She is frustratingly a work-in-progress. But she knows damn well enough to recognise the same anger in Kara.





	

When her therapist first gently, infuriatingly, pointed it out to her Cat wanted to immediately start yelling. But that would have confirmed everything that woman was saying. So instead she shot a withering glare, climbed off that hideous couch, pushed out of the office and stood in the hallway seething. Fists clenched. She only managed to calm herself down by mentally listing all the things wrong with her therapist’s décor. Starting with the couch. Pink. It was _bright pink_. 

One— It was so bright that it would surely make even the least anxious patient immediately experience heart palpitations.

Two—It was cheap and saggy, lacking the most basic lumbar support. 

Three—It looked like a reject from Barbie’s Dream House.

Four—

“Cat, are you ready to come back in and talk about this?”

She hissed out a breath, pushed into the office and sauntered back in without meeting her therapist’s eye.

It was simply unacceptable to discover this about herself. But she had no choice but to tackle it with the same amount of force as she did everything else in her life. It was a fact about her that she couldn’t change: some people experienced anxiety in ways that stoppered them up, made them withdraw. Panic attacks. Avoiding human contact. Anxiety as obvious fear—not that she didn’t have her own experiences with that flavor of anxiety. But on the whole, Cat got to experience her anxiety as pure, irrational rage.

“So, what? I’m not even allowed to be angry now?”

“That is an oversimplification, and you know it.”

She had to make lists. Do that infuriating “homework” her therapist insisted was necessary. _Try and separate what is reasonable to be angry at from the unreasonabl_ e. Did that woman not know how stressful Cat’s job was? Try being a CEO of a global media empire, and then tell me what’s reasonable to blow your stack over. 

Is it not reasonable to scream when someone makes a mistake in accounts and costs her thousands of dollars? Is she supposed to save her fury for screw-ups in the millions?

Is it not reasonable to be furious when an underling forgets yet again to check with Legal before publishing unfounded gossip? Leaving Cat with several fires to put out, more people to call, and a very angry celebrity to placate.

Is it not reasonable to want things to run smoothly, for once? To get furious at the most basic of typos? At the general level of incompetence displayed by her staff, save for one overly-sunny creature swathed in a dizzying array of unfortunate cardigans?

Take a goddamn number, try to accomplish ten tasks that Cat managed over a cup of steaming latte, and then come back and say _oh, but your anger isn’t reasonable_.

She did the lists, though. Cat was nothing if not efficient. And she discovered that she did get angry at lots of seemingly inconsequential things, sometimes explosively so. She made the list again the next day, and the next. And maybe, ok possibly maybe it wasn’t worth all that energy to lose it over the smell in the elevator. Or sometimes, if she was having a particularly bad day a simple gust of wind would irritate her to the point of needing to talk herself down from her rage.

Ok. Anxiety then. She could get onboard with that theory. 

It was just so pathetic — no, be aware of the language you use, Cat. Not pathetic. Frustrating. It frustrated her to not be in control of herself. To be so intelligent, but simultaneously irrational. It was infuriating, because a lot of the time she had no idea when it was happening. She would yell, and growl and want to rip someone to shreds—generally whatever employee that was standing in front of her with pathetic excuses spewing out of his idiot mouth. And then maybe an hour later, or perhaps well into the night when Carter was in bed and she was lying back on her couch—her tasteful, non-loud, non-anxiety-inducing couch. She would take a moment to breathe out. And it would hit her.

Oh.

And she would feel ridiculous. Ridiculous. 

She didn’t like it. Not knowing if she was angry or anxious. Not being able to tell the difference. Having every little decision she had made in recent years (or longer) come into question. She refused to feel bad about it. She refused to feel crazy. She wasn’t crazy.

She was just working on it. She was working on it.

* * *

When Kara started ranting and raving angrily at her, Cat could recognize that there was something else behind it. She couldn’t say what. That was Kara’s to interrogate. But she’d be remiss if she didn’t at least try and point her in the right direction. Or make her start looking to find it. 

She ended up getting wildly drunk, and didn’t remember half of what she said. She remembered Kara insisting that no, she was actually angry at Cat. She remembered telling Kara about Perry White. And talking to her, really talking to her about the double standard when it came to women expressing anger. 

She didn’t remember kissing Kara until a full two days later. And Kara hadn’t said anything in the interim, hadn’t acted any different. Hadn’t been overly sunny, overly nervous, overly clumsy. It was almost as if she hadn’t made out with her assistant in a tasteful downtown bar after talking endlessly about women in business. 

Cat sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up first.

And yes—yes, maybe Cat acted a little more irrationally as a result of this…incident. Maybe she backslid a few times and forgot to do her little lists, forgot not to scream at Kara for mistakes that weren’t even mistakes. She never claimed to be perfect.

* * *

Cat recognized that same anger in Kara, a couple of months later. A hardness, a smugness. Something brazen and, to be honest, all too familiar in the way Kara waltzed her way out of Cat’s personal elevator with a dress tighter than anything Cat had even seen on the girl. Oddly, it calmed something in Cat. Made her more hesitant, more aware of her own random bouts of aggression. But she should have taken it as a warning. A sign of something darker.

Because it turned out, even Supergirl wasn’t immune to a streak of bad behavior. Childish, cruel and dangerous behavior. First came a petty argument Cat never expected to have in the presence of Kara in that suit. It was enough to put Cat on the back foot, to make her hesitate even as she berated Supergirl for her immature mood swing. And that’s when things took a turn. A sudden sensation of falling and falling—screaming. The overwhelming fear that this was it. The shocking hardness in Supergirl’s eyes, even as she dove in at the last minute and scooped Cat up in her arms. Caught. Saved. But with a sneer.

It started with the wrong elevator, and it had turned into this. Something was wrong, something terrible had happened to Kara. But Cat still had to go on air, stare out at the people of National City and warn them away from their hero. 

Kara was a broken thing when Cat found her on the balcony later that night. She could tell by the way Kara was folded into herself, eyes downcast, cape limp—she was herself again. Cat felt suddenly calm, like she always did around Kara. She couldn’t find it in her to be anything but forgiving. She could search forever for her anger, and not find it.

Kara could barely look at Cat. She seemed ashamed off her anger, of the anger behind the anger. She was so unlike Cat—it took a chemical alteration of Kara’s brain to make her cruel. To make the darker, furious parts of her take the lead. Cat wanted to pull her close, tell her how precious she was. But instead she stood there, letting Kara talk softly, shakily. Kara pleaded for forgiveness. All Cat could do was tell her that she knew Kara could overcome this, that Cat still believed in her. And when they both ran out of words, Cat stayed out there with Kara, watching the city in silence. Cradling her drink while Kara curled into herself, as if needing to make herself as small as possible. Kara’s eyes were glassy, staring out at the city like she wanted to apologize to every flicker of light.

“I missed you,” Cat said, after a while. Her voice felt loud in the silence that had enveloped them. Kara looked over at her, hesitantly.

“You…Um…”

“This past week,” Cat clarified. “I missed Sunny Danvers. More than I’d like to admit.”

“Miss Grant…” Kara swallowed. “We’ve been over this…”

“I’m not going to push you to say anything,” Cat said softly. “Not after this week. I’m not that awful, Kara.”

Kara stared at Cat for a second, her eyes widening at the name pronunciation in a way that was so uniquely _Kiera_ that in a different situation it would have been comical. But the moment was over quickly, and whatever low mood that had been there before seemed to make Kara sink into herself again.

“But I did miss you,” Cat said again, her voice cracking a little. "I’d be remiss not to mention that.”

Kara was watching her carefully, uncertainty still clouding her features before she seemed to come to a decision.

“The worst part is that it _was_ me. All of that,” Kara swallowed. “That came from inside me. I don’t know who I am.”

“Kara…”

Kara shook her head, but didn’t say anything more.

“I can’t say it will be easy, going forward. You know that, ” Cat said. “What I can say is that I know it wasn’t _you_. It wasn’t.”

Kara let out a long breath and Cat looked over to watch her wipe her eyes.

“You are the best person I know, Kara.”

Kara seemed to melt a little at that. She smiled—not with the same gale force that she would on a good day, but it was there. Fragile and precious, like everything about her. But she gave Cat this look, this look so steeped in pure wonder. A look that spoke of too much admiration, like she thought her boss contained the whole world somehow. Cat wanted to disabuse her of the notion. Warn her away. But she also craved desperately to pull the girl close, to whisper sweet things into her hair. To simply hold her. And perhaps she would, another day. But not now. Now was a time to put Kara first for once. To forget her own crap and anger and baggage. She smiled back at Kara softly, feeling too many things all at once. But Cat was able to contain them all, to let anger be anger, let love be love. To feel it, and be ok somehow with the giant mess of it all. There was so much she wanted to say to Kara, so much she needed to do. She let out a long breath, and smiled again when Kara did the same. Turning back to the view of the city, Cat allowed herself to get lost in the moment with Kara by her side.

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to work on this for a challenge, but instead stopped writing for three months. The theme was, unsurprisingly, "anger". You'll have to let me know if I was trying too hard with my threading the season 1 canon in with Cat's generalized anger-related anxiety.


End file.
